Mobile phones and PDAs are used by numerous people around the world. As these devices become more powerful, they can be platforms for many types of applications. Currently, substantial industry efforts focus on developing methodologies for viewing document pages on a mobile phone, PDA, or a device with a small display.
It is challenging to view and navigate a document effectively on a small display. Typically, the user must manually scroll around and zoom in and out; for example, using applications such as the Adobe Reader 7 for Symbian OS, described in Adobe Reader 7 for Symbian OS, available from Adobe Corp. (2007). However, the viewing process is quite tedious because the user needs to press the scroll and zoom buttons many times. With the Adobe Reader, each zoom operation requires 3 button presses because it is accessed through a menu. To zoom to a user specified scale (e.g. 80%, 125%), it takes 8 or 9 button presses to navigate the menu and enter the scale value on the keypad.
While the user can view the document using a fixed scale that is suitable for comfortable reading of the document's body text, this makes navigation more time consuming when the user has to read text that is larger than the body text (e.g. title and heading text). The reason is that less of the larger text is shown on the display, and more scroll operations are required to move through the larger text.
Thus, the conventional industry approaches are deficient in their ability to facilitate efficient display of information on small information displays for easy viewing and navigation by the user.